While working at Astound Group as a Creative Technologist, I had the opportunity to work as the main developer for Break Limits; A client project, built in Unity, for the Shoptalk 2025 event in Las Vegas!

Break Limits challenged players to throw a ball (tracked by LIDAR) attached to a tether towards a massive LED wall. The goal: aiming to hit as many on-screen targets as possible as they approach the screen, within the time limit, racking up points to reach top spot on the leaderboard.

This project went through several unique iterations leading up to the final result. The technical highlight for this project would be the integration of a LIDAR camera. The challenge here was to accurately pick up the ball while also filtering out the tether it's attached to, which would trigger a "false positive" screen touch whenever the ball was thrown.

The vision for this project was to create an experience that represented breaking through real world digital commerce challenges. Gamifying this experience required a lot of in person QA (in office and on the show floor in Vegas once it was fully built) to ensure resolution and accurate LIDAR camera detection with Unity.

For gameplay, I designed a system with multiple spawn points across the top of the screen, using randomized target positions, speeds, and movement curves to keep each round unpredictable. After some QA and testing to make sure objects weren't overlapping during gameplay, I implemented Object pooling to hide and respawn the targets at their starting location. This was to avoid object destruction and reduce garbage collection within the Unity build/PC.

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At the end of gameplay, a QR code is generated containing the players score and a unique token ID for the web URL, leading them to the leaderboard and their place on the leaderboard.  We added a rotating screensaver and ad space to the project for the client, and a metrics tracking system to record gameplay statistics, engagement data, and high score submission data.

Astound Group's Case Study